María Victoria: Situating Book History in Colonial Spanish America
How has book history as a discipline approached understanding the colonial encounter in the Americas? What role did the printing press play in Spanish American colonial society? How was printed text used as a tool of colonial power to disseminate Spanish culture and repress indigenous knowledge? These three central questions have guided my research which surveys key contributions made in the field of book history that situate the role of print culture in the complex historical milieu of colonial Spanish America. As a discipline, book history focuses on the creation, dissemination, and reception of print culture. It studies the social, economic, and cultural history of authorship, editing, printing, publishing, and reading practices. This literature review centers on book historical research in colonial Spanish America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The traditional literature concentrates on two lines of inquiry. The first primarily concerns the establishment of print technology and its first publications in Mexico and Peru. The colonial printing press had a dual role: to help disseminate Christian doctrine among colonized native populations, and to preserve and expand Spanish culture in the New World. The second line of inquiry traces the proliferation of published European thought in the colonies. In the past two decades, new theoretical perspectives in the field of early Spanish American studies have generated a critique of the cultural authority of the Western book in the New World. Alternate avenues of inquiry seek to capture more fully the range of printed and nonprinted forms of communication in colonial Spanish America, especially those of native origin.
This literature review begins with a historiography by Hortensia Calvo that assesses the state of book history as a discipline. Calvo is then followed by three authors who focus on traditional book historical topics such as the transatlantic book trade and the restrictions imposed on book printing and publishing by the church and state. The works of Carlos Alberto González-Sánchez, Albert A. Palacios, and Magdalena Chocano Mena fall under this category. These authors are then followed by Marina Garone Gravier, Joanne Rappaport, and Tom Cummins who center on studying the book as object and printed text as visual plane for mapping and encoding language. The secondary literature is then wrapped up by literary scholars Walter D. Mignolo and Rolena Adorno questioning the cultural authority of the Western book in Spanish America and critiquing colonial literary production. The literature review finishes off with four primary sources: José de Acosta’s ethnohistorical chronicle that compares Amerindian and European writing systems; the Laws of the Indies which governed the book trade in the Americas; and two Catholic missionaries’ translations of Church doctrine into indigenous languages using the Latin alphabet.
The ultimate goal of this literature review is to provide a solid foundation for researchers new to the field of book history to situate the major concerns of the discipline within the context of colonial Spanish America.